Do you think privacy and anonymity are being eroded in the digital age?

Don't be fooled by "anonymity." There is no such thing, since every node in a communication system must have an ID. Concerns about privacy and anonymity are outdated. Cypherpunks think they are rebels with a cause, but they are really sentimentalists.

In the '50s, men were crying about the "mass" man and spilling tears over too much anonymity. And they were right, or more right than the cypherpunks. Factories and corporations gave men roles, not souls. Industrial society was anonymous. Cities, factories, secret ballots with mechanical polling booths - that's anonymity. The Big Brother bogeyman of the machine age used technology to enforce anonymity and prevent anybody from doing his own thing.

The era of politics based on private identities, anonymous individuals, and independent citizens began with the French Revolution and Napoleon's armies (a product of the popular press) and ended with Hitler (the product of radio). The cypherpunks are still marching to the same martial music. You think private individuals and mass industrial society are opposites? They are part of the industrial configuration. Instantaneous electronic society gives everybody an identity - which we all want, and which we all also want to lose - while putting almost intolerable pressure on our sense of privacy.

Privacy disappears in the simultaneous stimulation of our patterns of thought.

Then why do you send these messages via an anonymous remailer?

I am not anonymous, but have simply changed my ID. Think of it as a brand. An old brand goes stale, or ends up controlled by a competitor, so you think up a new one. Wyndham Lewis taught me that the secret of success is secrecy, and I used to think he was joking. But now I realize and am trying to demonstrate that these anonymous remailers are among the great publicity devices of all time. They provide a unique ID that is very glamorous and easy to distinguish from a common name. You change it at will, and it even incorporates the sacrificial element of naming and renders tabloid-type identity exposes unnecessary.

What's your take on media juggernauts like Microsoft? Should it be allowed to stranglehold electronic media?

We fear that the owners of the monopoly will crush us, but this never happens. In a flash, the monopolist's products appear out of date, and competition in that particular industry becomes irrelevant because the whole basis of moneymaking has shifted to a new area. As the pace of technological change speeds up, shifts in economic power increasingly seem like magical flipflops produced by luck. The old logic of monopoly - centralized stranglehold - no longer works. The attention of consumers can shift instantly and make the most profound investments obsolete in just a few years, soon to be sped up even further. We will see economic empires crash within hours, and new ones arise just as quickly. The task of the economic manager now is to try to hold monopolies in place just long enough for economic transactions to occur. The capitalist understands that to improve competition, he must encourage monopolies.

What would you do about the inequality of the technological haves and have-nots?

Equality is an industrial ideal, along with voting, time clocks, and the minimum wage. Machines promote equality; that is their downfall. The organic unity of pastoral times was replaced in the machine age with fragmented individuals, who could compete with each other. This unequal competition gave a foundation to the idea of equality. The industrial age transformed millions of rural farmers into mass workers and mass consumers. Only by transforming millions of rural farmers into a mass of workers and street riffraff could machines succeed in smearing the doctrine of equality around the world.

The hubbub now about equality is actually a nostalgia for machines. Our environment has been transformed into a single omnipresent network that embraces and encompasses individuals of unequal status. Machines - extended to their limit and transformed into a single omnipresent network environment - will flip into sacred and ritual environments. Recognized as an extension of ourselves and properly managed by a priestly class, technology inspires rituals, performed out of something like love. This development restores machines to their original totemic purpose. Whereas Marx recognized machines as "the dead hand" of the past, the electronic network could flip this totem (an amputated body part, you'll notice) into a shrine for ancestors.

Machines are gods not simply because they are powerful, but because they are the living embodiment of our ancestors. The Christian and the pagan worldview come together in an attitude of unconditional love of machines.